The Best DevOps Practices for Mobile App Development

Globally, more than 5.2 billion people have mobile apps on their devices. This, of course, is a huge number and it only highlights the popularity of mobile apps. It also highlights why more and more people are trying to get involved with mobile app development.

However, you can’t start to build an app without first understanding some basic DevOps best practices. But what is DevOps, how does it work, and why is it important for the process of app development? Keep reading and learn more about how it works below.

There are many companies out there that produce mobile apps on a regular basis. Most likely, they create apps at a high frequency and within relatively short time periods. This kind of schedule would not be possible without DevOps.

But what is DevOps exactly? To start, it is important to understand that it is a mixture of ideas, tools, and different practices that all come together with the purpose of optimizing a brand’s ability to create services or products. When you create your own app on your own, you’ll only be able to work so fast and it will likely take you quite a long time.

But when you use DevOps, you will find that it will make the entire process much more efficient in many different ways. Besides making it easier to create products and services at a faster rate, it also makes it easier to update and upgrade various products. There are a few main points that you should know about when concerning DevOps.

For example, build automation and continuous integration are both very important parts of DevOps which we will discuss later. Besides that, you can’t forget about continuous deployment and infrastructure as code throughout this process. There are also other things to consider such as monitoring, microservices, orchestration, and more.

Without all of these things coming together, it would be impossible for DevOps to work as smoothly as it does. In a way, you can think of DevOps as a very well-oiled machine. As long as all of these practices, tools, and ideas are accounted for, the entire process should go very smoothly and very fast.

Besides being used to create mobile apps, DevOps is also often used to create different types of software and even different types of infrastructures. Whatever the case, in the realm of mobile app development, you will find that the use of DevOps is essential. It polishes the mobile app development pipeline so that no interruptions get in the way.

DevOps teams are designed to be as fluid as possible and they often have many functions so that they can do several things at once. The quality of the resulting products and services is, of course, also very important. After all, there wouldn’t be much of a point in this kind of efficiency if low-quality products were being produced.

But how exactly does DevOps work on a more specific scale? Let’s next explore some of the most important factors in DevOps: automation and integration.

When you build an app, it may not sound very complicated in its early stages. However, when it is actually time to create your own app, you will find that it is much more important than you might have expected. Build automation is more or less what it sounds like: it consists of automated lines of code along with other automated processes.

The goal of these processes is to streamline the app creation process. The more you automate, the easier it will be for the process to flow. After all, once you manage to create an automated process, there will be little room for error and each product from that process will be more or less the same.

This is not to mention that build automation is far faster than any manual job and it can be used for just about any programming language out there. As you can imagine, without build automation, the process of app development would be very slow and painful. Build automation is often seen as the foundation of DevOps since it has such an essential function.

But what about continuous integration? Continuous integration mainly has to do with testing lines of code and weeding out any errors that may be present. It also has to do with code merging.

Whatever the case, continuous integration is arguably as important as build automation for a variety of reasons. This is because continuous integration has the ability to detect coding errors early on before they become big problems. This, as you can imagine, is essential for making sure that you’re not focused on fixing a bunch of errors further down the line.

This method also uses modular code and code that is easy to move on to the next stage of app production. But there is one other method that you should consider here: continuous deployment, also known as CD. CD makes it possible to add pieces of code to the production process a little bit at a time so that this deployment is continuous.

That way, the code that reaches production will be steadily supplied and free of errors. Because it only released a little bit of code at a time, it makes it particularly easy to make sure that the result is fast and high-quality. Indeed, continuous deployment makes this entire process much faster and easier to manage.

This is not to mention that you can rely on continuous deployment to do its job since it is such a reliable method. These three methods of build automation, continuous integration, and continuous deployment all come together perfectly to make the entire DevOps process completely streamlined. That way, producing mobile apps is a breeze and far easier and more efficient than doing it the old-fashioned way.

But these three methods only scratch the surface of what DevOps is. So, what else is there to consider?

While we have already covered some of the larger players in the realm of DevOps, it is also important to consider the methods that function to fine-tune the app development process. Orchestration is all about automation and it all has to do with making sure that everything goes as smoothly as possible. Resource provisioning is a good example of orchestration, but it can do much more than that.

It is particularly good at supporting different processes and making sure that all the workflows involved move as smoothly as possible. This is not to mention that it has great potential for scalability. Even as the app development process gets larger and more complicated, the orchestration process will be able to grow along with it and continue to manage it no matter its size.

It is also a very stable method, especially since it focuses on automation so much. Monitoring, on the other hand, is all about catching problems before they become too serious. This is possible through the collection of data regarding the performance of certain processes.

Then, through the presentation of that data, it is possible to see what kind of problems might be present or if the information at hand is high-quality. This method is also highly automated and very efficient as well as very fast. Combined with the orchestration process and the other processes discussed previously, all of these tools together simplify the app creation process drastically.

But what about microservices? Microservices may not always be necessary, but they can certainly be helpful in some instances. For example, if an application is too large for what is necessary, microservices can carefully break it apart into smaller services that are still useful in their own ways. This makes the process very flexible and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it to get the results that you require.

Overall, all of these DevOps practices for mobile app development are essential. If one goes missing, the others will start to fall apart and, of course, the app development process will become quite a lot harder as a result.

DevOps and mobile app development go hand-in-hand and ensure that apps can be created in a fast and high-quality manner. DevOps consists of many processes and practices such as build automation, orchestration, continuous integration, and more, all to make sure that apps are produced efficiently and well.

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